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Peer-to-peer (P2P) trading in a local energy market (LEM) offers various participants the opportunity to negotiate and strike energy deals among themselves using a distributed ledger technology called blockchain. In this paper, a new local model is presented using a layer-2 scalability solution for second-generation (Gen2) blockchain technology to enable P2P trading among four types of participants: consumers, prosumers with solar photovoltaic (PV) systems, prosumers with solar PV systems and battery energy storage systems (BESSs), and electric vehicles (EVs). The proposed LEM trading platform involves several critical steps, including the creation of typical forecasting profiles for load consumption, solar generation, and battery state-of-charge (SOC) through a forecasting solution. Next, the LEM participants place their pricing bids using a trading agent service, and the trading engine collects the profiles data and bid prices, which performs matchmaking in a forward-facing market. The output of the trading engine consists of dispatch signals for prices and energy values that are sent to each participant to execute actual trading. Furthermore, the trading engines store the accepted and past bidding data and energy values of P2P trades for each participant in blockchain technology, which can be retrieved and displayed on the LEM user interface screens of participants and administrators using their blockchain addresses at any time during the trading process. This study focuses on simulating proposed LEM models, incorporating functional limitations and market rules. These rules aim to reduce energy costs, enhance margins for utilities and retailers, and mitigate grid congestion through BESSs, resulting in reduced operational and capital expenditure. LEM outcomes are analysed and compared with a Business-as-usual (BAU) model. Participants’ energy trading behaviour, cost-revenue dynamics, grid impact, and blockchain implementation costs are explored. The study highlights LEM benefits in terms of reduced CO2 emissions by 984 kg CO2, increased self-sufficiency by 2.2%, and improved financial benefits of all participants by 21.6%. The use of modern blockchain technology guarantees secure data storage and rapid, cost-effective energy trading, thereby making the proposed LEM platform a viable solution in the distribution market.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading has emerged as an innovative approach for selling electricity from prosumer to consumer at the distribution level. This paper is the first to conduct a techno-economic assessment of P2P energy trading in Aswan, Egypt. Different scenarios under different electricity tariffs, which consider photovoltaic systems, energy storage systems, and electric vehicles deployment, are analyzed to assess the performance of P2P trading considering different distributed energy resources (DERs) installations. The variety of these scenarios enables a thorough analysis of P2P trading and a clear comprehension of how P2P trading impacts distribution networks. The study offers new perspectives on the impacts of implementing P2P trading on the distribution network since it uses a real demand profiles. Results show that P2P energy trading can reduce community electricity costs, improve self-consumption by reducing exports to distribution system operator, and rise self-sufficiency compared to home energy management system (HEMS). The distribution network operation limits are not violated in any of the studied scenarios and electricity tariffs. The impacts on the distribution network for P2P trading scenarios and equivalent HEMS are very similar for flat tariff. However, for time of use tariff, P2P trading scenarios with flexible devices result in higher impacts on the distribution network than the equivalent HEMS.

The massive adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) has caused an increasing demand for electric energy to charge the vehicles. Efficiently managing energy trading between energy providers and energy consumers can lead to meet the high demand for charging EVs while reducing its cost compared to traditional power provided by the utility company. However, a large portion of the existing systems leveraged for trading energy between EVs are centralized and fall short in providing transparency, reliability, audit, security, and trustworthy features. In this paper, we propose blockchain-based energy trading using an auctioning and reputation scheme. We develop Ethereum smart contracts which enable owners of EVs to automatically request electricity to charge their vehicles in a reliable, cost-effective, secure, and trustworthy manner. The proposed approach ensures the lowest rate available by implementing a reverse auctioning scheme for fair competition between providers to provide the requested service at the lowest cost. The proposed solution enforces high quality of service through a reputation-based approach that quantifies the performance of the service providers and gives an advantage to more reputable providers. We present the implementation details of the deployed system on a test Ethereum blockchain platform. We perform system testing and evaluation to validate and assess the functionality and performance of the proposed solution. Furthermore, we present security and cost analyses to show the affordability, robustness, and practicality of the proposed approach.